With Michael Jackson’s passing, his first feature film in a starring adult role, The Wiz, is now worth re-examining. Made before Jackson was a solo musical artist, it contains one of his finest musical and dramatic performances from his career. Its journey to the screen and creation are as interesting as its content, especially in light of the many Jackson tributes taking place across all media.
As much of a success as MGM's 1939 version, The Wizard of Oz, was for its time, although largely relegated to cult status until its many later airings on network TV, the remarkable work in director Sidney Lumet’s 1978 version The Wiz stands as a forgotten blockbuster for its own time, a period when fantasy films were being rediscovered with the release of Star Wars the previous year.
A Reimagined Version of a Classic
With an all-African American cast and a re-imagining of the story as a musical by Charlie Smalls, first produced on Broadway in 1975, The Wiz was triumphant in the conception of its fantasy characters and its overall presentation. Imagined as a futuristic valentine to New York with surreal imagery throughout, The Wiz was boldly conceived. In this Land of Oz, we see familiar landmarks throughout Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn which are somehow updated fantasy versions of structures we have seen in many other films. Matching the visual imagery, the makeups were no less ambitious, with the Lion, Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Witch each attempting to offer more hip urban versions of the characters from Baum’s pages.
Chief among the first of the key characters tackled was the design for the 18-year-old Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow. “He had a Reese's cup nose, and I remember working that out,” makeup designer, the late Stan Winston said. Tests were done in New York with Mike Thomas [deceased summer of 2009] creating Jackson’s two-hour makeup on a daily basis. Shot on sets at Kaufman-Astoria Studios, and on locations ranging from uptown Manhattan to Flushing Meadow, Queens, to Coney Island in Brooklyn, The Wiz featured Jackson’s debut film performance as an adult, a striking realization of a fantasy character.
Looking back over 30 years now, Michael Jackson is unrecognizable as the Scarecrow and brings an unusual heart and pathos to the character, clearly creating his own ideas for the role and not merely copying Ray Bolger’s unforgettable turn as the character in the 1939 film. A nearly dismissed production number, “You Can’t Win,” is one of Jackson’s finest of the period and ushered in his musical and personal relationship with Quincy Jones, leading to their historic efforts on Jackson’s first solo album the next year, “Off the Wall,” and, of course, “Thriller” four years later.
Jackson is mesmerizing delivering “You Can’t Win” to the crows in his very first scene and in his preceding dialogue with them. The combination of film editor Dede Allen’s intercutting of said snappy urban patter, mixed with Tony Walton’s production designs, Winston’s makeups, and Lumet’s direction make for a sequence that needs serious re-examination by cineastes and Jackson fans alike.
Inventive Production Numbers
Following this number is the first major dance sequence of the film, the initial turn of “Ease on Down the Road,” which has many reprises throughout the film. This first version features Jackson and Ross singing and dancing down a newly discovered Yellow Brick Road while traveling over the Flushing Meadow Bridge (south of the World’s Fair site) towards an Albert Whitlock matte shot with five Chrysler Buildings above Coney Island’s legendary Cyclone roller coaster. Somehow, due not to editor Allen’s choices but likely Lumet’s inexperience with musicals, the footage is drastically under-covered, mandating much of this sequence followed exclusively in a long shot, and from behind, no less.
The next several sequences feature even more dynamic stagings, as Dorothy’s trek involves picking up Nipsey Russell as the Tin Man, trapped in the Cyclone’s bowels, and a Yellow Brick Road scene that deposits the heroes in front of the New York Public Library where Ted Ross (no relation to Diana and a veteran of the Broadway cast) is stationed beneath a stone lion as the Lion character. Their respective production numbers are more suitably realized with more footage from amongst which editor Dede Allen was able to make choices in keeping with the surrealism that Lumet targeted in the remainder of the film.
At the very least, The Wiz was a groundbreaking project whose achievements were somewhat lost in the hype of the film’s release and the hoopla over its hefty budget – at the time, a reported outrageous $30 million. Before his death, Winston reflected on the inherent value of the project: “It was my first time working with Michael Jackson, who I've maintained a close friendship with since then. I can see now that The Wiz was a tremendous undertaking with some wonderful characters.”
A sad coda to the film is all of the elements and people who are no longer with us: in addition to the destruction of the World Trade Center, demolition of Shea Stadium, and closing of Coney Island as an amusement park (forecasted in the film’s screenplay), many of the craftspeople and actors have passed: Charlie Smalls, Stan Winston, Mike Thomas, Albert Whitlock and actors Thelma Carpenter, Mabel King, Richard Pryor, Ted Ross, Nipsey Russell, Theresa Merritt, Stanley Greene, and now Michael Jackson are all gone. Perhaps with Jackson’s passing, The Wiz will be revisited and given its due as a landmark film of its time.
Scott Essman - Scott Essman (born 1966) is an American writer, who has been writing and producing projects about motion picture craftsmanship and ...
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